A marker is seen on the site of a Presidio Trust restoration project at Landfill 8, behind which is seen the newly renovated former hospital, on Tuesday, October 5, 2010 in San Francisco, Calif.

Photo: Lea Suzuki, The Chronicle

A marker is seen on the site of a Presidio Trust restoration...

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Lew Stringer (l to r), Presidio Trust restoration ecologist, and Amy Deck, Presidio Trust project manager stand at the site of a Presidio Trust restoration project at Landfill 8 on Tuesday, October 5, 2010 in San Francisco, Calif.Lew Stringer (l to r), Presidio Trust restoration ecologist, and Amy Deck, Presidio Trust project manager stand at the site of a Presidio Trust restoration project at Landfill 8 on Tuesday, October 5, 2010 in San Francisco, Calif.

The ghosts of long-dead mariners may or may not lurk behind a newly renovated former hospital on the western edge of the Presidio of San Francisco, but their bones are still there.

The remains of more than 600 sailors were recently entombed under mounds of sand trucked over from Golden Gate Park and deposited on a hill ringed by trees near Mountain Lake.

The newly laid dunes, planted as they are with native grasses and flowers, including rare San Francisco Lessingia, represent a renaissance for the forgotten dead after the graveyard was used as a dump site by 20th century bureaucrats.

The cemetery, which dates 135 years, is being transformed into a living, breathing ecosystem.

"It is a restoration of a historic landscape and the birth of new life in that area," said Lew Stringer, the restoration ecologist for the Presidio Trust, which manages the park. "It is going from a degraded concrete and earthen waste site to a thriving sand dune habitat which supports much more life."

Tragedy and intrigue

The restoration of the graveyard on what is known as Landfill 8 is a tale of tragedy and intrigue dating to a time when San Francisco was filled with sailors, gamblers, gunslingers and boozers from all over the world.

It all started in the 1850s when the city's merchant marine hospital at Rincon Point was built. It was badly damaged in the 1868 San Francisco earthquake and closed.

This was a time when the city's docks were full of sailing ships and steamers. Merchant mariners worked long hours under brutal conditions, and even the sick and injured ones tended to get into trouble at the bars and gambling joints in downtown San Francisco.

In an attempt to save the sick from themselves, the U.S. Treasury Department leased property far from the frolicsome Barbary Coast in a remote area of the Presidio at what is now 15th Avenue and Lake Street.

"A lot of merchant marines were solitary types who would leave their homes and sail the world for years and years at a time. They weren't the easiest people to find relatives for," said Eric Blind, the archaeologist for the Presidio Trust. "The hospital would do its best, but those for whom no next of kin could be found were buried out in back of the hospital."

600 in the cemetery

Blind found in his research that between 1875 and 1915, more than 600 mariners from 43 countries and eight U.S. states and territories were buried on the wind- and fog-swept hillside in the middle of the Lobos Creek Valley drainage.

The dead were mostly young men in their 20s and 30s who suffered from respiratory diseases such as tuberculosis, but quite a few died of scurvy, leprosy, malaria, syphilis and other ailments associated with ship travel to exotic places, Blind said.

The list of the dead and buried, uncovered recently by Presidio Trust researchers, included gunshot victims and at least one man who "died of insanity," a condition that, thanks to modern medicine, is rarely fatal these days.

Dennis Linehan of Ireland fractured his skull when he fell in a coal bunker onboard a ship in 1891. Spaniard Enrique Lora died in 1907 as a result of "assault by footpads," a slang expression for muggers, and poor John Johnson of Finland was felled in 1911 "by a sling load of cement."

The wooden cemetery headstones were still visible at least through the 1930s, according to Blind. Then, in 1952, the hospital expanded and money was appropriated to move the cemetery. Public Health Service officials apparently filed a certificate saying the graves had been moved, allowing workers to pile 16 feet of construction debris, including toxic materials, on top of the old cemetery.

Opting for restoration

The hospital was decommissioned by President Ronald Reagan in 1981. The 480-bed medical center sat vacant for years but was recently reopened as 154 luxury apartments.

Archaeologists preparing for the transfer of the Presidio to the National Park Service discovered to their horror in 1989 that the coffins had never been moved from Landfill 8.

"A lot of people were of the opinion that we should make this terrible thing right and remove the landfill, but it would have been a very difficult, ugly project," Blind said. "There's 16 feet of construction debris and landfill out there, and they didn't put it out there gently. We found evidence of disarticulated bones within the landfill, leading us to believe that it wouldn't be a clean project."

The decision was made instead to restore the area as close as possible to the way it was before Europeans arrived in America, as windswept sand dunes. About 25,000 cubic yards of excavated sand from the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum construction project in Golden Gate Park was used to build a 3-foot sand cap. The artificial dunes are now covered with tiny colored flags marking the locations of native dune grasses and other plants.

San Francisco Lessingia, an endangered species that grows only in the Presidio and on a patch of sand at San Bruno Mountain, will be planted this month and during the season's first rains.

Making amends to dead

The idea, ecologist Stringer said, is to stabilize the area and forever seal underneath the toxic debris and human remains. The dune grasses and plants should attract bees, birds, reptiles and butterflies, among other species, which will be visible from an adjacent trail and soon-to-be-built boardwalk and overlook.

One of the most important improvements, he added, will be the interpretive signs that will be placed in the area over the next few months to honor - and perhaps make amends to - the dead.

"It's a layer cake of history here," Stringer said. "These people had been forgotten, and this project is bringing them to light."